The Legacy of Elizabeth Pringle
First published 2014
Reception
- 2016 Longlist
About the book
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Elizabeth Pringle has lived on the beautiful island of Arran for over 90 year; the retired teacher and spinster is a familiar and yet solitary figure tending her garden and riding her bicycle around the island. When she dies she leaves her beloved house ‘Holmlea’ to a woman she merely saw pushing a pram down the road over thirty years ago. That young mother Anna had put a letter through Elizabeth’s door asking to buy the house but Elizabeth never pursued her. But time passed and Anna is now in a home with dementia and it falls to her daughter Martha, the baby in the pram, to come and take up their inheritance.
Martha, in her mid-thirties, is unfulfilled by her job as a journalist, bruised by a bad relationship, and struggling to cope with her mother’s encroaching illness, compounded by her younger sister Susie’s denial of her mother’s worsening condition. ‘Holmlea,’ will be Martha’s escape. Once on the island Martha meets a brother and sister Niall and Catriona Anderson and a Buddhist monk called Saul, each of whom leads her closer to Elizabeth while revealing their surprising friendships with this old woman.
International Dublin Literary Award 2016 longlist
Family Life
Akhil Sharma
A Brief History of Seven Killings
Marlon James
Academy Street
Mary Costello
Dept. of Speculation
Jenny Offill
Diary of the Fall
Michel Laub
Lila
Marilynne Robinson
Our Lady of the Nile
Scholastique Mukasonga
Outlaws
Javier Cercas
Catalogue record
- ISBN
- 978-1-4447-5231-1
Full recordClose
- ISBNs
-
- 978-1-4447-5231-1
- 978-1-4447-7761-1
- 978-1-4450-9916-3
- 978-1-4447-7763-5
- 978-1-4447-7762-8
- Author
- Wark, Kirsty, 1955–
- Statement
- The Legacy of Elizabeth Pringle / Kirsty Wark.
- Records
- Open Library
- United Kingdom
- 2010s